VM won't boot from Windows 98 SE floppy disk

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Pyrodron
Posts: 1
Joined: 28. Mar 2015, 10:32

VM won't boot from Windows 98 SE floppy disk

Post by Pyrodron »

I'm trying to boot from a Windows 98 SE boot disk in the VM but I'm having issues where when it stops reading the disk, the machine hangs with a blank screen and I can't figure out what's going on.
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dlharper
Posts: 291
Joined: 25. Aug 2011, 19:17
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: VirtualBox+Oracle ExtPack
Guest OSses: MS Windows (several versions); DOS

Re: VM won't boot from Windows 98 SE floppy disk

Post by dlharper »

To start with, try reducing the amount of RAM assigned to the VM. 512Mb is more than Windows 98 can use easily. (Theoretically it should work; in practice it gives problems.) Give it less that 64Mb. You may be able to increase it later once a decent video driver is installed.

Having said this, I have had problems myself booting the Win98 floppy on some machines. I have found the simplest solution is to use instead a boot floppy from Windows 95 OSR2. You only need it to partition and format the hard disk. (Make sure you enable Large hard disks - it is not the default.) Once this is done, copy the files from the Windows 98 CD to a directory on the hard disk and run SETUP from there.

Note that you cannot use a floppy from the first release of Windows 95, unless you want to confine yourself to a hard disk of less that 512Mb.
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